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Xref: sserve comp.os.linux:47541 comp.os.386bsd.questions:3716 comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware:59905 comp.windows.x.i386unix:2438 Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!network.ucsd.edu!usc!howland.reston.ans.net!noc.near.net!uunet!think.com!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!grapevine.lcs.mit.edu!CATFISH.LCS.MIT.EDU!metcalf From: metcalf@CATFISH.LCS.MIT.EDU (Chris Metcalf) Newsgroups: comp.os.linux,comp.os.386bsd.questions,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware,comp.windows.x.i386unix Subject: Re: SUMMARY: 486DX2/66 for Unix conclusions (fairly long) Followup-To: comp.os.linux,comp.os.386bsd.questions Date: 12 Jul 1993 01:54:28 GMT Organization: MIT Lab for Computer Science Lines: 38 Message-ID: <21qg8k$ra3@GRAPEVINE.LCS.MIT.EDU> References: <21k903$3q4@GRAPEVINE.LCS.MIT.EDU> <PCG.93Jul12003233@decb.aber.ac.uk> NNTP-Posting-Host: catfish.lcs.mit.edu I've set followups on this thread to the OS groups only. In article <PCG.93Jul12003233@decb.aber.ac.uk> pcg@aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi) writes: >The main difference is that the BSd kernel is stable, and BSD 4.4 has >been vastlu cleaned up and made more coherent and more general; the >Linux kernel is not badly written, but its organization is far more >haphazard. I'm not convinced there's much difference in stability; I've heard many people say their Linux systems stay up many months at a time. As for architectural elegance, my impression is that this is not something that Linus was initially shooting for---but perhaps something that will grow as, e.g., 680x0 ports start to work and architecture-independent code is separated out cleanly, or if the proposed post-1.0 C++ reorganization starts to get underway. By contrast, 386BSD seems to have gone the opposite direction, with lots of grim architecture-dependent hacks in it, and NetBSD trying to pull back the other way. You pays yer money, and you takes yer choice. Other people have addressed your remarks about Linux having no swap, and about the wonderfully cheap price of 340M disks these days; I am using this workstation as a sort of offline research instrument, so a small local disk for "caching" my at-work data is what I need. The last point to address is SCSI. I did consider this for a while, but today (this year, nor probably next year) I just don't need a CRROM or a backup device; if I did, I would have paid up for SCSI. Unsurprisingly, we only use SCSI peripherals at work, so that's what I am prone to use. But I can keep this IDE drive until I need a full-fledged home machine, and THEN put out the bucks for a VLB SCSI, a 1GB drive, and so forth. The old IDE (hanging off a $20 non-VLB controller) will work just fine for storing my source-code tree or some such at that point, I'm sure. -- Chris Metcalf, MIT Laboratory for Computer Science metcalf@cag.lcs.mit.edu // +1 (617) 253-7766